Neighborhood XR

Scenario: What is this bug?

Stephen sits at the bus stop and sees a little bug with too many legs. He wonders what it is, so he pulls out his handset and browses over to the Tree of Life site, then clicks on the link to the identification aug. It prompts him to switch into a magic window view, which he accepts, and then he points the handset camera at the bug. It spends a few seconds watching the bug and figuring out that it's a millipede. Stephen then switches back to flat view and reads about what this species of millipede eats and how it lives.

Scenario: Graffiti

Lee is bored. School is boring. Teachers are boring. The other students are especially boring. Seems like hanging out down by the river is the only time he gets to think and not worry about what's happening at home and hear about stupid crap he doesn't care about. He likes to draw, though. When he gets to the river he puts on the glasses that they issued him at school and pulls out his handset. He touch taps open the drawing app, picks the brush and color, and then uses the handset to draw big strokes around the path by the river's bank. He adds fantastic new flowers to tree limbs. He draws a short castle around the snake hole where he saw that long snake that time. He runs across some of his earlier drawings and erases them, because he's a lot better at drawing now.

Lee takes a selfie of himself surrounded by his drawings and sends it to his mother. Maybe it will help her through today. Sometimes he skims other peoples' drawings, but mostly they're boring, so mostly he just makes things prettier than how he found them.

Scenario: TV time

Amy arrives home after a tough day at work, looking forward to a glass of wine and the latest episode of her show. She throws some food in the slow cooker and sets a timer on her handset for when she needs to check it. With dinner on the way, she sits on her sofa and slips on her glasses. Her flock of apps appears around her, including the timer for the food. She pulls forward the show app and pokes the play control on the latest episode thumbnail. She lowers the glasses' light shield so that she can only see the app. Her flock fades away and the episode appears around her. Amy leans back and watches events unfold, occasionally tutting to change position or direction in the scene.

The timer eventually rings and she pauses the episode, brings up her flock, lifts the light shield, and turns off the ringer. She pulls off the glasses and makes a bowl of food. When she sits at the table, she puts on the glasses and places a camera window over her food so that when she expands and starts the episode she can see to eat.

Scenario: Flâneur

The doctor says that if Jan wants to avoid sciatica pain in the future she'll need sit as little as possible and to walk at least 45 minutes every day. So, each day at lunch she dutifully steps back from her standing desk, puts on her jacket and glasses, takes the elevator down from her office, and walks out into downtown Seattle.

Jan usually doesn't keep a lot of augs or apps running, but she's started to leave the Architectural Digest aug running so that it points out interesting bits of the Seattle skyline while she walks.

Half-way through her route she wants a bit of music, so she tells her assistant to play one of the road trip streams offered by Spotify. The Spotify control app appears in her flock and follows her as she walks. When she pauses to wait for a crossing signal, her flock catches up and flows around her into easy-to-reach positions that won't distract her too much.

On occasion one of the songs will annoy her, and she'll poke the Spotify app's skip control. When a great song comes on, she'll grab the app and tap it against her favorite songs list that she keeps in a note that is stuck to her forearm. The title and artist with a link appear at the bottom of the list.

Scenario: Morning time

Devi steps quietly out of her bedroom so that her partner can sleep in after a long night. She puts on her glasses as she walks downstairs and her flock comes alive. She shoos her music and sculpture apps aside and pushes the web browser app to the front as she tells it to open the BBC news page. She pokes the page to play the World News podcast while she starts the coffee, but it's too intense for morning time so she tosses it away. As she starts the 4 minute timer, she notices that one of the search augs that she left in the kitchen has located a new vegetarian burrito stand a few blocks away. she tuts its map pin over to mid-day on her calendar and walks downstairs to the garden.

The plant babies need some water, and her music app picks up a sound stickie that the kid left on the watering can. It begins to play one of their compositions, which lasts about as long as it takes her to water everyone. She pulls up her keyboard and pokes out a proud parent emoji next to the watering can for the kid to find.

Devi left a lot of augs running in the downstairs lounge last night when she was poking at a new project, so she tuts most of them away. It's still too early and she hasn't had coffee. The one aug that she leaves up is a sketch of a character arc for a re-imagining of an Appalachian folk hero that she intends to sell into the Korean film market. She stares at it for a few minutes, and just as she flops onto one of the big pillows, the coffee timer goes off.

She sighs and heads upstairs to bring a cup of the sweet nectar of life to her partner.

Hitchcock was awake. Starlight filtered through the forest canopy and dappled the walls of the cabin he shared with Lester. A trio of Clytemnestra’s beetle bots was resting in Lester's sleep-crumpled dreads, occasionally flicking their wings in response to dreams. Sometimes he forgot ...

Clytemnestra was in fragments. Her programs were spread across her stolen space ship, the station she just stole it from, and the small bots that she used to steal it. As each program relayed its experiences to the other, an avalanche of memory effects like ...

Lester was obsessed. It had been a year since the massive beam of light printed the white sphere that invited humanity to a distant star, and he still spent most of his time inspecting the sensor logs in his office. Pictures of the beam and ...

Elizabeth Stinton was frustrated. Her simulations for turbulence in her theoretical air sinter were a mess and if she didn't have something to show at the next board meeting she was pretty certain that they'd sell her startup for parts.

The pounding in my head is in sync with the ticking of the escalator steps as they rise from the netherworld of the convention center's floor. I pull a smile from memory and ignore the sweat in my eyebrows. So many happy attendees, clipping ...

Last weekend I had coffee at the wonderful Uptown Espresso with a friend from a nearby Amazon office. I write "a" nearby office because he's working on a multi-year project so secret that he can't even tell people which building he's in ...

I am a software engineering newbie. I thought that I knew a lot about it after I coded my first BASIC program on a TRS-100 way back in the before time, but now I see that the creation of software is a vast landscape of ...